The people that blame capitalism are often wrong...they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation. Capitalism has a ton of advantages that a socialist system would not have, the negatives are easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
Not sure what 'blaming capitalism' has to do with the content of the video in the link we're supposedly discussing. (Advantages ... for whom?) It's speaker says that our situation is post-capitalist, and that we're in a feudalist economy now.
> they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation
Regulation works in a theoretical world where the rules of the game are set by an outsider entity, which is powerful enough to enforce said rules and yet completely separate from economic power.
In real life, players affect the rules: lobbying, marketing, media ownership, cronyism…
Context: the speaker Lea Ypi is a professor of political philosophy. She grew up in socialist Albania, and here she's talking about how during her studies of political philosophy in Rome, her Western "socialist" classmates had a fantasy about socialism, and didn't want to hear about her experience growing up in socialism/about the socialist countries that have failed.
I have a feeling you're doing the same, just with a different -ism.
> easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.
> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
Just a thought but you could probably argue that the US is the largest and most advanced of the capitalist systems in the world, and that makes it somewhat of a bellwether for the future of other capitalist countries.
I think the US is rather unique from other capitalist countries in having such a large portion of its population being so poorly educated. This simply isn't the case in EU or Commonwealth countries - in the US its led people to vote against their own interests, allowing companies to lobby for things that benefit the companies and hurt people, in an ever increasing trend. I don't think it's to do with the size of the country, but the education level of the population.
Looking at the wiki page, PISA seems to have some criticisms, one being it seems very gameable. I'm not really familiar with it.
It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.
There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
If capitalism itself is the reason for not being able to pass good regulation, then what would you call that ? We are living in a world where corporations are people and it’s ok to lobby
>If capitalism itself is the reason for not being able to pass good regulation, then what would you call that ?
A lack of regulation.
> We are living in a world where corporations are people and it’s ok to lobby
Corporate personhood is not the same thing as "corporations are people". Lobbying wouldn't inherently be an issue with an education and caring voting population.
> Corporate personhood is not the same thing as "corporations are people".
Call it "corporate personhood" if you want, the practical effect I am talking about is corporations being protected as speakers in elections.
> Lobbying wouldn't inherently be an issue with an education and caring voting population.
So yes, education helps, but “just have better voters” doesn’t remove the structural advantage of concentrated money and full-time influence operations (lobbying).
This is just plain old Liberalism, a mixed-market economy. Socialism can mean two different things: a) when the govt spends and does literally anything, b) eliminating Capitalism, by way of having everything controlled by the "public" (really, the State, as even ancoms will just reinvent government by another name).
There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.
Even wealth taxes are ineffectual and have been tried, but wealth limits is pants-on-head stupid. If you want to redistribute wealth, you need to generate it first. If wealth were zero sum we'd still be fighting in caves over sticks. This is the most anti-liberal and anti-prosperity idea next to "degrowth".
Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
>Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself.
The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.
Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. Mitigating monopoly is key and already accounted for. There's no reason to believe corporations can inevitably grow themselves into that position, and as history shows, no one can predict which ones will be the most valuable (let alone valuable) in the future.
As for individuals, dynasty dissipates and breaks up in wealth. A rich person doesn't live forever, and seldom do competing offspring manage to generate as much. Their pile shrinks as they spend it away.
Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law. We can already see what concentrated power looks like; it is entrenched and intertwined with government, not operating outside its bounds. See: Xi Ping, Putin and others. Power often comes with wealth, but wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
>Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law.
Above? He already does. He does not need to break the law in a literal sense: he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws, avoid antitrust through lobbying, he owns a newspaper to influence public opinion and elections if needed…
>wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
> he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws
This is unsubstantiated.
> avoid antitrust through lobbying
Lobbying does not guarantee any result, it is literally just asking the government for something you want. And, why does Amazon need to be subject to anti-trust? By far their most profitable product is AWS, and it has a ton of competitors.
> How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
You previously implied that AMZ would find new, novel ways to skirt taxes through sheer lobbying, while your source just seems to plainly show that online sales taxes are now implemented. Lobbying does not make companies impervious to paying taxes.
> Do we really need an enumeration of cases where corporations and the rich and are intertwined with political power in the west?
Not a level of power that allows them to completely operate outside the law.
Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.